CALIFORNIAN: Students, orchestra team up for 'Beethoven Spectacular'

Charles Hand - For The Californian

The musical and visual arts will come together once more in a
California Chamber Orchestra's Beethoven celebration. "Beethoven
Spectacular" will be performed April 4 at the Old Town Temecula
Community Theater.

Students from Carol Barnes' Thompson Middle School art classes
spent three weeks listening to the allegro from Beethoven's Quintet
for Piano and Winds, one of two Beethoven pieces the orchestra will
perform. As the orchestra plays, the students' works will be
projected on a screen behind the musicians.

It may have taken nearly as much work to encourage the art from
the students as it was for Beethoven to encourage the notes onto
the page if Barnes' description of the effort is any
indication.

"This piece was probably the worst because it's boring," she
said, boring to the students anyway. "It's a nice piece for adults,
but kids need a lot of stimulus."

The 148 or so students who participated in the project are
between the ages of 11 and 14.

Among their responses to the music, which Barnes said she played
in class daily, were, "The music made me feel happy like I was on a
roller coaster," "The sounds reminded me of happy times," "Each
part makes me think of a different thing that has happened in my
life, like Christmas or going on vacation," "The fast music reminds
me of hard times in my life and the slower music reminds me of easy
times" and "The music reminds me of my sister doing ballet."

The variations in tempo and mood in the music produces
differences in the way the students responded "Conjures up
different emotions."

Barnes said she started the exercise with study of Beethoven,
followed by playing the music and asking students to think about
the emotions generated by what they had heard.

Then she asked the students to write down their reactions. She
asked them to note the colors suggested by the music, the lines
they saw when they listened, the things the music brought to mind.
Then she asked them to represent visually what they had heard. Even
among the better students, that did not come easily, she said.

"I expect the best," Barnes said. "If I don't think it's their
best they have to do it over until it is their best."

Barnes said she sees the exercises as valuable to the students
on several levels. Not only does it teach them to appreciate the
music, but to appreciate the connections among different forms of
art.

Buyers got I handed her project from her husband, who burned the
student art to a DVD with color corrections is size adjustments and
it will be that DVD that will be played on concert night.

Gref agrees.

"Many of these kids have never listened to a piece of classical
music," he said.

One of the selections will invoke the well-known finale of
Beethoven's ninth symphony, "Ode to Joy," in its spectacular
conclusion, said Gref. The two selections introduced the romantic
movement in music, Gref said, the time in which Beethoven produced
his nine symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, violin
concerto, piano and violin sonatas and his opera, "Fidelio."

Beethoven did not write in a vacuum, Gref said, and his work
reflected not an artist working in musical isolation, but an artist
well aware of the world around him who wrote music describing that
world. Especially tour the end of his career, the world around
Beethoven was changing, the Gref's said, and Beethoven's music
changed with it.

That is reflected in the range of music in the concert. One
selection is from the early part of his career, a piece that
invokes one of Beethoven's heroes, Mozart.

"Beethoven always sounds like Beethoven," Gref said. "However, I
think you will hear a difference. Beethoven liked a quintet so much
he wrote one like it. It sounds almost like the same composer."